By SEAN AXMAKER, SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, June 2, 2005

The credits roll to the strains of an impressive take on Carlos Santana's guitar solo on "Black Magic Woman." The film waits until we're duly impressed before the camera reveals the player: a diminutive 12-year-old boy with a guitar almost as tall as he is.

Guitar phenom C.J. is the star pupil of the Paul Green School of Music, the Philadelphia music school that surely inspired the comedy "School of Rock." Dedicated to the "essentials" of '70s guitar rock anthems, it now numbers about 120 students ages 9 to 17.

The soft-spoken C.J. is only one of a handful of students picked out in director Don Argott's portrait. He draws from the gifted (Madi, a teenage folkie from a Quaker background), the merely enthusiastic (9-year-old twins Asa and Tucker, would-be punks with more exuberance than aptitude), and the cordially hopeless (Will, the clinically depressed "Charlie Brown" of the school).

All are upstaged by spotlight-loving founder Green, wannabe rock god and self-styled instructor/manager who confesses "I'm probably not qualified to teach." He's idiosyncratic to be sure, not to mention immature, and his approach spans from flippant frivolity to berating and teasing to screaming insults and throwing tantrums.

Green is hardly Teacher of the Year material (the introspective Will reminds us that Green's verbally aggressive approach isn't always funny), but even in his screechiest moments (and there are plenty), he communicates with his students on their wavelength.

Green's philosophy is that if no one tells kids that something is beyond them, then they have no reason to believe they can't rise to the occasion. And they do, culminating in a set of incredibly sophisticated, complex Frank Zappa songs by the school's best and brightest at the 2003 Zappanale (a German music festival dedicated to Zappa's music).

It's a big enough film to hold all the contradictions. Green has an ego and a gift for stealing the spotlight with a wink and a grin. Yet his respect for the kids is genuine. The film -- like Green himself -- steps back from the teacher to see the apprentices take center stage and earn their applause.